Just days into 2026, the Trump administration gave us yet another reason to be horrified for the future. Initially, under the guise of preventing drug flow into the United States, a flimsy claim at best, Trump launched an invasion into Venezuela, which ended with the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and a country left in shambles.
Just to make it entirely clear, I will not be defending Maduro in this article. I personally believe that if Maduro had the intention of growing socialism in Venezuela and improving the lives of Venezuelans, he utterly failed in that goal. That being said, the wide-reaching implications of this action are far bigger than Maduro, and could lead to far more lives being destroyed.
The biggest issue with the U.S. invasion of Venezuela is sovereignty. President Donald Trump and his administration took an action that violated the sovereignty of another country. This was done, as was later revealed, for the sake of oil companies that wanted to do business in Venezuela without having to cooperate with the sitting government. Mere days after the invasion of Venezuela, oil companies such as Halliburton have been lining up, ready to pillage Venezuela’s oil wealth for themselves, leaving a broken country and people in their wake.
In the aftermath of the invasion, the pretext of halting the drug trade was swiftly abandoned, with the administration openly stating that its interests lie within the Venezuelan oil supply. Trump and his administration seem determined to have the United States govern Venezuela for an indefinite period of time, presumably until they have either plundered the nation for all its worth or found replacement leadership willing to be obedient to capitalist interests.
Regardless of the justification given for the attack, the precedent that the United States can, on its own and without consequences, topple a sovereign government raises alarm bells of increased acts of warfare in the future. It is honestly no surprise at this point that the administration has so shamelessly bent to the will of wealthy oil donors. This is just a repeat of the Iraq War, as we’ve seen this movie before. The difference is in just how blatant the administration is in its violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty.
The message sent is all too clear: if you choose, democratically or otherwise, to run your country in a way the ruling class of the United States does not approve of, the action in response will be swift and brutal. It is not your will, nor the will of your people, that matters, only the whims and wishes of the rich looking to carve the world up among themselves. This has always been the status quo of U.S. foreign policy; Trump has simply removed the mask.
